Customer satisfaction is typically very important to vendors such as telecommunications companies. Many vendors therefore employ specially trained customer service representatives (CSRs) to help ensure that calls from customers with questions or requests pertaining to the products that the company provides are handled effectively and efficiently. Effectiveness and efficiency are typically important goals for a customer service department. To increase the effectiveness and efficiency of CSRs, some companies provide CSRs with paper documents to be used for guidance when handling customer calls. Such a document may be known as a “contact strategy document” or a “CSR script.” For instance, a contact strategy document may be designed for handling calls from customers who want to add products to or remove products from their existing accounts. Such as contact strategy document may guide a CSR through steps designed save products from being cancelled and to upsell customers.
While handling a customer call, a CSR may also interact with various screens from an enterprise system, such as a legacy mainframe application or database. For example, the CSR may use function keys to navigate through various legacy application screens to retrieve account data for the customer, data about the company's goods and services, etc. Accordingly, for a given call, the CSR may be required to perform the following tasks: (a) converse with the customer; (b) navigate through multiple legacy application screens; (c) refer repeatedly to the contact strategy document; (d) save existing products by producing explanations that overcome customer objections; (e) upsell available products by describing their benefits to the customer; and (f) process customer orders by manually entering data into various fields in the legacy application screens.
Collectively, these tasks require significant mental effort, and they demand the memorization of considerable amounts of information by the CSR. These requirements may overwhelm many CSRs, and, as a result, CSRs may navigate through the enterprise application screens in an inefficient manner and may fail to use the prescribed contact strategy. Consequently, overwhelmed CSRs may fail to meet save and upsell goals, customer satisfaction may suffer, and the service provider may lose revenue that might have been realized, had the CSR performed as expected.